Are natural and organic bathroom products really ethical?

To be sure ‘organic’ cosmetics are worthy of the label, look for the COSMOS-organic or COSMOS-natural stamps, which are on more than 10,000 products. Alternatively, NaTrue standards cover 1,400 products

The real deal: products ethical consumers can rely on include Dr Hauschka. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Call me a sucker, but I’ve always found something vaguely heroic about products that can mend split ends, lift growers of exotic ingredients out of poverty and mend the ozone layer. It’s probably a legacy of my early teens. For me, ethical consumerism will always smell of peppermint foot lotion from Anita Roddick’s Body Shop.

The early adopters, like Roddick, were heroic because in the beauty industry going green doesn’t just go against the grain, it’s a pain in the neck. The cosmetics and personal-care industry is about standardisation and testing, not variable batches of cocoa butter from small-scale developing-world growers. The industry prefers synthesised ingredients made from dependable products, like petroleum, in a lab.

The payoff comes with the higher prices that green cosmetics command. Sales of lotions and potions that boast “natural” or plant-based ingredients exceed $30bn (£19bn). This gives rise to lookalike products with names that sound like “organic” but which contain only the teeniest percentage of organic or natural ingredients, botanicals or plant-derived products, or none at all.

Before his death this year, the founder of Aveda (he sold to Estée Lauder in 1997) and grandfather of green cosmetics, Horst Rechelbacher, noted sadly that natural didn’t really mean anything any more. Standards vary widely. Most prohibit petroleum-based paraffins, synthetic fragrances and parabens, and some include a positive list of plant ingredients. But when it comes to organics, some allow water as a constituent of the “organic” make-up, some do not. Unhelpfully, we still lack legal definitions.

But there is good news. In 2011 five of the main certifiers, including Ecocert and the Soil Association, got fed up with the muddle and launched a more harmonious standard: COSMOS-organic and COSMOS-natural. Look out for these – more than 10,000 products are certified to their standards. Also look out for NaTrue standards, which cover 1,400 products, including many from Dr Hauschka, a brand I rate highly.

More good news: you can now get a “salon-professional” finish from green cosmetics, such as a bestselling thickening haircare range from Aveda, that has an ethical sourcing story behind it, or an organic mascara from Green People. Because although we want beauty to be more than skin deep, we do want it to work, too.

Green crush

Last of a kind: Preservation Plates commemorating ‘last’ species are no longer being made. Photograph: PR

To rewild or not to rewild? Whether wolves and other apex species should be reintroduced to parts of the UK remains a hot topic (as shown by the reaction to my 26 October column ‘Why bring wolves back to the UK?’) but Robert Dawson is, as far as I know, the only ceramic artist to commit the debate to china. Commissioned by Volpe and Volpe, Preservation Plates commemorate ‘last’ species and are the last of a kind themselves. They were made in Stoke-on-Trent using traditional dusting machines to give them their distinctive finish, but these machines have now been sold. Snap up a piece of ceramic history – and 5% of the proceeds from the wolf plates will go to the pro-rewilding John Muir Trust. The plates cost £45 each (volpeandvolpe.com).

Greenspeak: Honey laundering {har-ni lornd /rīŋ} noun

How activists who are against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in the food chain describe changes to the EU Honey Directive that allow GM pollen to slip under the radar.